This Duke Basketball Twitter Account Is Everything Hateable About Duke Basketball

Summer’s almost over, and that means one thing: time to re-follow the official Twitter accounts of your favorite college sports teams. Running one of these accounts must be kind of a tough field to navigate what with the murky etiquette guidelines for corporate social media in general and the strong feelings people have surrounding sports teams. However if the goal is to represent the brand you’re tweeting about, it doesn’t get much better than the official Duke Basketball Twitter account, @DukeBluePlanet. The account raises some questions about what exactly it means to be an “official Twitter account,” as its bio reads simply “Official tweets from the Duke Men’s Basketball Office,” yet once replied to me claiming “This isn’t the official account right now.” So the tweets are official, but the account is not, whatever that means.

Duke Basketball is a program people tend to feel especially strong about one way or another, sort of like the Yankees, except Duke is actually still really good. So if you love that program, you’ll love how thoroughly this account covers their every accomplishment. And if you love to hate them, then you’ll REALLY love to hate bizarre lengths it goes to brag and the unending worship at the altar of Coach K.

Really, it’s uncanny how pitch-perfectly these tweets capture the tone of “Duke Basketball.” There’s the Coach K worship that is every bit ingrained in “Duke” as Christian Laettner’s shot in the 1992 Elite 8. The account has everything from your run of the mill postgame quotes from Krzyzewski to the straight-up odd, like this one about Coach and Mrs. K’s anniversary:

He taught them what love and family are all about. Of course he did, that’s what college basketball coaches are there for, but we all know that Coach K is more than just a basketball coach. So much more. I know whenever I see a rom-com or hear a love song, I immediately think, This is just like the Platonic ideal of all romantic love: the marriage of long-time college basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski and his wife, Mrs. Coach Mike Krzyzewski. Even if he’s the best basketball coach ever, which he very well might be, what impact does his 45-year marriage have on what he does on the sidelines? Does he use stories about the time he and Carol fought about the sink of dirty dishes back in 1972 to rally the guys in the locker room? I guess @DukeBluePlanet cares for the same reason Tiger Beat magazine writes about what Joe Jonas’s favorite color is: those 983 career victories and four national championships are so dreamy! It’s important to note that the black and white picture on the top left corner was also @dukeblueplanet’s avatar for a little while. Let that sink in for a minute.

Did we mention that Coach K was more than just a coach? In addition to being an oracle of wisdom on the nature of family and romance, Coach K is a scholar and philosopher of Life:

Now I don’t know if Coach K is sitting in his office all day emailing these inspirational quotes to whoever runs this account or if he said that in some interview or if it’s just made up, but “sometimes we need to think, dream & imagine?” Fuck you. It probably wasn’t intentional, but “imagine” is the perfect word because that’s the same kind of trite bullshit you’d see on a John Lennon poster in some Duke freshman’s dorm room. And again, the shitty thing isn’t that he said that, the shitty thing is that there are people out there who care what a basketball coach thinks about cell phones and video games.

My personal favorite Coach K quote tweet, however, is this:

This was, of course, after Duke beat number 1 Syracuse at Cameron Indoor Stadium in a game decided by a call so controversial that Jim Boeheim got ejected for running across the middle of the court yelling, “That’s bullshit! That’s bullshit!” 

Such an amazing example of someone winning by any means necessary, then acting like a little angel afterwards. But hey, he just wanted to point out to everyone that their celebration of basketball was phenomenal. It was a phenomenal celebration, both up there in the stands and down there on the court. Of basketball. The celebration of basketball was phenomenal. It wasn’t a close game, it was a phenomenal celebration of basketball.

There are also tweets like this, after the 2010 Duke National Championship:

I mean, of course you can’t blame them for being excited about winning a National Championship, but it comes off as like some kids in the back seat being like, “Daddy bought us ice cream, DADDY IS THE BEST!!!” And if that seems like vague nitpicking criticism, then yes, it totally is. It’s criticizing the vague sense of snobbishness that everyone hates about Duke.

Another strain of the annoying that runs through the @DukeBluePlanet timeline is the Made Up Statistic tweet. This is another instance of some information being objectively really impressive, but presented in a way that makes you wonder, “Why are you trying so hard to brag? We believe you.” To wit:

These are in the same family as those ad hoc stats you hear announcers say sometimes to fill time, like “X has more assists in the paint on Mondays than any player whose name starts with a J since 2006.” And yes, I mean it’s not bragging if it’s true, but seriously, act like you’ve been there before, Official Tweets of the Duke Basketball Office. As you’ve gone to great pains to point out, you HAVE been there before—eight times to be exact, which, I don’t know if you know this or not, is actually twice the amount of the next closest school.

Another class of tweets that really give you a good return on your hate-follow investment are the ones about former Duke players in the NBA, which you can find easily thanks to the hashtag created specifically for this purpose: #DukeInTheNBA. And boy there are a lot of them because, as @DukeBluePlanet will never let you forget, Duke has more first round draft picks than any other school in the ACC. These tweets are probably the worst, just because they’re mostly just abject bragging about how much money former Duke players are making, as though that’s something fans (read: people who are not Darren Rovell) actively care or know about.

And then there’s the photoshopped collages.

Whoa man, I don’t know about you, but that’s what really gets me pumped up about college basketball: the salaries of NBA players who spent one season on the team four or ten-plus years ago! “We gotta get someone to photoshop badass flames onto the exact number amount and terms of the contract for Luol Deng and Josh McRoberts because they’re on the Heat now and fire is hot.”

It’s silly to argue about sports rivalries, especially on social media. Duke is an outstanding program and this Twitter account is very good and informative. I don’t mean anything negative by this, I’m just observing that it matches the public perception of the Duke brand in a very effective way. That’s it. No shade.

@UNC_Basketball has 55k more followers. Heels!

Follow Eddie Brawley on Twitter.